folk

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. The common people of a society or region considered as the representatives of a traditional way of life and especially as the originators or carriers of the customs, beliefs, and arts that make up a distinctive culture: a leader who came from the folk.

n. Archaic A nation; a people.

n. Informal People in general. Often used in the plural: Folks around here are very friendly.

n. People of a specified group or kind. Often used in the plural: city folks; rich folk.

n. Informal The members of one's family or childhood household; one's relatives.

n. Informal One's parents: My folks are coming for a visit.

adj. Of, occurring in, or originating among the common people: folk culture; a folk hero.

idiom just folks Informal Down-to-earth, open-hearted.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

adj. Of or pertaining to the inhabitants of a land, their culture, tradition, or history.

adj. Of or pertaining to common people as opposed to ruling classes or elites.

n. A grouping of smaller peoples or tribes as a nation.

n. The inhabitants of a region especially the native inhabitants.

n. One’s relatives especially one’s parents.

n. Folk music.

n. People in general.

n. A particular group of people.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. In Anglo-Saxon times, the people of a group of townships or villages; a community; a tribe.

n. People in general, or a separate class of people; -- generally used in the plural form, and often with a qualifying adjective

n. The persons of one's own family.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. People, considered either distributively or collectively.

n. plural Persons mentally classed together as forming a special group: with a qualifying adjective or clause: in this use chiefly colloquial and generally in the form folks; as, old folks; young folks; poor folks.

n. The people as an aggregate; the common people: in this use without a plural form.

n. An aggregate or corporate body of persons; a people; a nation: as singular folk, as plural folks (but rare in the plural).

n. the traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of people in a community

n. a social division of (usually preliterate) people

n. people in general (often used in the plural)

Etymologies

Middle English, from Old English folc.

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

From Middle English, from Old English folc, from Proto-Germanic *fulkan (compare West Frisian folk, Dutch volk and German Volk), from *fulka- ("crowd, army"), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *pl̥h₁-go (compare Welsh ôl 'track', Lithuanian pulkas 'crowd', Old Church Slavonic plŭkŭ 'army division', Albanian plog 'barn, heap'; the Slavic and Lithuanian words may have been borrowed from Proto-Germanic instead). (Some have also unsuccessfully attempted to link the word to Latin vulgus, populus or plebs ). Related to follow. (Wiktionary)

Examples

 We use the term folk varieties in support of the efforts of Third World countries and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to have these varieties recognized as a part of the

He seems genuinely surprised by this, and he offers three examples of what he calls "folk wisdom" about the crisis that lack, he notes, empirical evidence: that investors were led astray by devotion to the efficient-market hypothesis, particularly on real estate; that Wall Street pay focused on short-term trading profits rather than long-term incentives; and that investment banks boosted their leverage in the years leading up to the crisis.

Now the difference between this primitive music and that which we call folk song is that the latter is characterized by a feeling for design, in the broadest sense of the word, entirely lacking in the former.